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Tuesday, 14 May 2013

No, I am not obsessed with Matt Cutts. I barely even know him. We once shared a drink and then… well. that’s another story…Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video to help answer many of the questions webmasters have been asking over the past several weeks. He focused primarily on what webmasters and SEO professionals can expect in the near future regarding what types of things will help, and what will hurt as far as ranking in Google’s results goes.

The video contained ten specific areas and how they will affect the future of SEO for virtually every type of site. It is no surprise that the main theme of the video is that black hat strategies will continue to be penalized and good sites who follow the rules will benefit.

Penguin Updates – Google will continue to tweak their penguin updates starting with a big change expected to go live in the next few weeks. This update is supposed to have an even bigger impact than the original penguin update. Naturally, this will make some people happy and others angry, but it really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

Advertorials– Sites using advertorials to attempt to inflate their overall link profile were penalized earlier this year. Even more action against this type of link building is going to be coming out later this year.

Spam Queries– Some keywords tend to attract black hat techniques more than others. Terms like payday loans, for example, are flooded with hundreds of low quality sites. Due to requests from outside of Google, these types of terms are going to be getting the attention of Matt’s spam team.

Upstream Targets – Link builders have been using layered ‘networks’ to avoid getting punished by Google for their unnatural link building. Google is going to start looking upstream at where the links are coming from and punishing those who are building unnatural link networks.

More Sophisticated Link Analysis–This point was perhaps the most interesting of all of them. Google claims they will be creating a more sophisticated profile of each site’s back links and where they are coming from. This more detailed analysis will undoubtedly help them find black hat SEO strategies and penalize them as well.

Hacked Sites– Google will be implementing improvements on warning users of potentially hacked sites as well as notifying the webmaster so corrective action can be taken.

Authority Sites – It is no surprise to anyone that Google loves authority sites, and Matt made it a point to say that they will continue to give ranking boosts to authority sites.

Panda Smack– Google acknowledged that some of the sites which were hurt by the panda updates were really not true black hat sites and they will be working to ‘soften’ the impact this update had on some of these sites.

Multiple of Same Domain in SERP –In an attempt to diversify the results on the first page of results Google is going to reduce the number of pages from the same domain that are displayed.

Webmaster Communication – Finally, Matt once again expressed his desire to have more open communication with webmasters so everyone can get the rankings they deserve.Overall this was a very informative video and I highly recommend everyone take a look. You can see the video in its entirety on YouTube CLICK HERE .